


a word too often used but not believed

by loveleee



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Post-Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-05-23
Packaged: 2018-11-03 22:00:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10976181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveleee/pseuds/loveleee
Summary: Things in Riverdale are feeling – better. Brighter. Archie’s dad had finally returned home from the hospital, and so far the Serpents’ offer of protection to Jughead had remained just that, and not the thinly-veiled threat that Betty had feared. Even Cheryl Blossom had returned to school at the beginning of the week, albeit in a much more limited wardrobe, sans her signature red lipstick.Riverdale is moving on. Betty is moving on – and she wants Jughead to come with her.





	a word too often used but not believed

**Author's Note:**

> Set post-1x13.

“I’ve been thinking,” Betty says.

Jughead looks down at her, his mouth curving up into a half smile, and swings their hands a little where they’re clasped between them. There’s near silence in the trees around them, except for the occasional crack of a twig beneath their feet. The lake is one of the few places they can go to be really alone, now that Jughead is living with a foster family, and Betty’s mother is buzzing around the Cooper home as Polly spends her last few weeks of pregnancy on bed rest.

“Oh?”

“I think I should go on birth control,” she says matter-of-factly.

Truthfully, she’s been thinking about it for weeks now: about how easily Jughead had lifted her up that night in the trailer…about how perfectly he’d fit between her legs when he’d pressed her up against the kitchen counter…about how good his lips had felt on her collarbone. She’d been so ready and willing – pliant, _eager_ under his hands – to open herself up for him, no questions asked.

Thinking about it again, now, nearly makes her palms sweat.

Jughead doesn’t say anything, and she looks up at him. His expression could best be described as dumbstruck. “Yeah,” he says quickly. “Yeah, that seems – sensible.”

Betty bites back a smile. Whatever had gotten into Jughead the night of the Jubilee hadn’t really resurfaced in the weeks since. The appearance of two dozen biker gang members at their door had brought that night to a screeching halt; when they’d learned about the shooting at Pop’s the next morning, sex had fallen even further down the list of priorities.

But now things in Riverdale are feeling – better. Brighter. Archie’s dad had finally returned home from the hospital, and so far the Serpents’ offer of protection to Jughead had remained just that, and not the thinly-veiled threat that Betty had feared. Even Cheryl Blossom had returned to school at the beginning of the week, albeit in a much more limited wardrobe, _sans_ her signature red lipstick.

Riverdale is moving on. Betty is moving on – and she wants Jughead to come with her.

“I have a gynecologist’s appointment next Tuesday,” she says. “And I read that you’re supposed to take the pill for a week before it actually works.”

Jughead nods along as she speaks. “Okay.”

“I just have to figure out how to get a prescription without my mom seeing,” Betty continues, biting her lip.

Jughead snorts. “She _should_ be thrilled. Teen pregnancy kind of runs in the family. No offense,” he adds.

“None taken,” Betty says, squeezing his hand. “I am _not_ trying to follow in those footsteps.”

They walk in silence for a few minutes, Betty acutely aware of her heart thudding in her chest. There’s no reason to be nervous – not with Jughead. But it feels – momentous, somehow, to say these things out loud, to _prepare_ to lose her virginity with him, instead of just letting it happen. It feels grown-up. She wonders if Polly or Veronica had felt this way – but then, they’re not really planners.

She’s lost in thought when Jughead stops, suddenly, and before she can say a word his hands are framing her face, his skin cold against her flushed cheeks. He kisses her and she kisses back, her fingers curling into the pockets of his coat.

After a long, lingering moment he breaks the kiss and leans his forehead against hers, his hands slipping down to rest at the base of her neck. “I love you,” he says.

Betty keeps her eyes closed, forcing herself to keep breathing. She had never imagined she’d feel _this_ way about _this_ boy.

“I love you, too,” she says.

 

 

 

 

Leave it to Veronica to come up with a plan on the spot. When Betty tells her about her doctor’s office dilemma at lunch the next day, she looks at Betty like she’s dense.

“Just tell her I’m giving you a ride because we’re going to my place to practice a Vixens routine after,” Veronica says.

“But – I actually do need a ride,” Betty points out.

“Yes, and I’ll actually give you one, silly. I’ll just do my English reading while you’re in there, or something.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

“Of course.” Veronica smiles, her eyes flashing wickedly, and leans closer across the cafeteria table. “This is very exciting, you know.”

Betty laughs. “It is? It’s not, like, grand espionage, or anything.”

“It’s better. I get to help Betty Cooper get _laid_ ,” Veronica crows, at the precise moment that Kevin appears with his lunch tray, dropping onto the bench beside her.

“ _What_?” he says. “Please tell me I didn’t hear that wrong.”

Betty presses her lips together as her face practically glows with heat. Veronica has the grace to look somewhat guilty, mouthing _Sorry_ with a little shrug of her shoulders.

Kevin looks between them expectantly, his face dropping when the girls remain silent. “Okay, fine. _Don’t_ tell me anything,” he mutters, ripping the lid off a container of applesauce.

Betty sighs. “It’s not _you_ , Kev. I just need Veronica’s help with some…logistics. I wouldn’t even be talking about it otherwise.”

Veronica puts her hand to her chest in mock offense. “So you’re just using me. Such a fickle friend, Betty Cooper.”

“I love logistics,” Kevin deadpans through a mouthful of applesauce. Despite herself, Betty bursts into giggles.

“I hate you guys,” she says, and ends the conversation with a firm bite of her hamburger.

 

 

 

 

Jughead’s fingers dip beneath Betty’s collar, tracing lightly over the skin of her shoulder as she leans against him in a booth at Pop’s, half-finished milkshakes on the tabletop before them. It’s a Thursday night and she’s still got at least an hour of homework waiting at home for her, but the booth is so comfy and Jughead is so warm that she’s seriously considering just falling asleep right then and there.

“Hey, listen,” Jughead says. “I’ve been thinking.”

She lifts her head to smile at him. “Oh, you do that too?”

He flicks her ear gently. “You’re hilarious.” He clears his throat, his fingers falling still against her neck. “So. You know how you’re going to the doctor next week.”

Betty nods.

“I thought maybe – if you want – I could do that too. Get, like, tested,” he clarifies.

Betty sits up so she can get a better look at his face. She frowns. “I…didn’t think you’d need to,” she says slowly.

“I don’t. I’ve never done it with anyone else.” Jughead shrugs, avoiding her eyes. “I just thought it might make you feel more – comfortable, or something.”

Betty thinks she might literally melt into a puddle, right there in the middle of Pop’s. She presses a kiss to his cheek. “You’re sweet,” she says. “But it’s okay. I trust you.”

Jughead looks relieved as he picks up a fry, dipping it into his milkshake before he pops it into his mouth. “Okay. I just thought I should offer.”

“Is this weird?” Betty wonders aloud. “That we’re, like, planning this?”

“I don’t know.” Jughead dips another fry in his shake, but this one he offers to Betty. She opens her mouth. “Maybe. But need I remind you, _I’m_ kind of weird, and you’re dating me, so that makes you weird, too. By the transitive property, or whatever.”

Betty swallows the fry and laughs. “If Betty likes Jughead and Jughead is weird, Betty is weird?”

“You are gonna ace the SATs.”

She bats her eyelashes coquettishly. “All thanks to my tutor.”

“Besides,” he says, lowering his voice. “We tried it the other way, and it didn’t exactly work out.” He leans in, his lips brushing close to her ear. “I don’t want your mom _actually_ walking in on us this time.”

“Ugh, stop,” Betty giggles, pushing him away. “Finish your milkshake.”

 

 

 

 

That night there’s a soft knock at Betty’s bedroom door, just as she’s finishing up a problem set for pre-calc. “Come in,” she calls out.

Polly practically waddles in, both hands resting on her enormous stomach, her long blonde hair loose and messy around her shoulders. Betty thinks she looks like a woman out of an old Renaissance painting, pale but flushed, her face much fuller than it had been even a month ago.

“Pol, what are you doing,” she chides, stacking her notebooks to make room on the bed. “Mom’s going to flip if she sees you walking around.”

Polly rolls her eyes, but settles onto the bed, leaning back on her hands. “I’m fine,” she says, but winces as she scoots herself back a little further, making the mattress bounce.

“Yeah, you sure look it.”

Slowly, carefully, Polly lays all the way back on the bed, letting out a long breath. “I just want them to come out,” she complains, and Betty rubs her arm in sympathy.

“They will. Soon,” Betty says.

“Sixteen days,” Polly adds. “Hopefully.”

Betty brushes a lock of hair off of her sister’s shoulder. “Are you scared?” she asks, wishing she could take the words back the moment they leave her lips.

Polly is quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry,” Betty says. “I don’t know why I said that. Everything’s going to go great.”

“No, it’s okay,” Polly says. “The answer is – yes. I’m scared of giving birth, but – more scared of what’s after, I think.”

Betty doesn’t say anything, just keeps stroking Polly’s hair.

“None of my friends even talk to me anymore,” Polly continues. “The only person who ever texts me is Cheryl. And I don’t know if she even likes me, or if she’s just doing it because of the babies.”

“Cheryl likes you,” Betty says, though she’d wondered the same thing when Cheryl had stopped her in the hallway the other day to ask after Polly.

“So is that what my life’s going to be?” Polly asks. “Trying to take care of two babies while Mom and Dad criticize me, and my only friend is a crazy girl who burnt down her own house?”

“Of course not,” Betty says, trying to keep her tone soothing, even. She feels almost dizzy, like she’s been slapped in the side of the head. Polly had never said anything like this since coming back home. She’d been relentlessly, insistently positive, poring through baby name books, sorting through her and Betty’s old hand-me-downs from the attic, stenciling pale green vines around the walls of the guestroom-turned-nursery. Was this what she’d really been thinking the whole time?

“I’m here. I’ll help.”

Polly takes a long, shaky breath. “Sometimes I wonder if I made the right choice,” she admits. “And then I – god, I feel so _guilty_. They’re my _children_ , Betty.”

Betty doesn’t know what to say. She sits with Polly, combing her fingers through her hair until her sister falls asleep.

 

 

 

 

On Sunday afternoon the doorbell rings. Betty pauses _Jane the Virgin_ and brushes lint off of her sweatshirt as she walks through the house to answer it. Her parents had left an hour ago to run errands, and Polly had holed up in her bedroom listening to the _Les Mis_ soundtrack on repeat on all morning, leaving Betty to bask in her first Sunday alone in what felt like months.

“Hey Archie,” she says brightly when she opens the door, standing back in surprise.

Archie smiles at her. “Hey Betty. My dad sent me over here – do you guys have a cake pan he can borrow?”

Betty tilts her head to the side. She’d eaten dinner with the Andrews dozens of times over the years, but it had never been followed by a homemade dessert, at least not after his mom had left. “Um, yeah, definitely. Come in.”

“Thanks.” Archie follows her into the kitchen, unzipping his jacket in the warmth. “It’s so weird. He can’t go back to work for a few weeks still, and he’s gotten really obsessed with this baking show on Netflix. Everyone’s British on it.”

“Oh my god, I _love_ that show,” Betty says, ducking down to open one of the cabinets on the side of the kitchen island. “Do you know what season he’s on?”

“No,” Archie laughs. “But I’m not surprised you know exactly what I’m talking about.” She glances up at him; he’s looking back down at her fondly, and she feels her face grow warm without warning. She turns back to the pots and pans.

“Do you know what size he wants?”

“One sec.” Archie consults his phone. “Nine inch?”

“Here.” She holds the pan out over her shoulder, and Archie takes it, then grabs her hand to help pull her back up to her feet.

“Thanks.” Betty kicks the cabinet shut behind her, and leans back against the counter, creating a little more space between herself and Archie.

Archie hadn’t done anything, and he hadn’t said anything. But ever since he and Veronica had broken up – right after his dad was shot, and when Veronica’s father had still been high on the list of possible suspects – Betty had noticed him giving her…looks. The kind of looks that she’d once daydreamed about, not even a year ago.

The kind of looks that suggested maybe Archie was daydreaming about _her._

She wonders what he’d think if he knew about her and Jughead – if he knew more than what he already knows, which is that they’re together, and not much else. Jughead doesn’t talk about girls or sex or love with Archie. He doesn’t talk about those things with anyone, she supposes, other than Betty herself, and – well, she doesn’t count. The thought makes her a little sad.

There’s a pause that lasts just a second too long, and then Archie raises his eyebrows, holding up the pan. “Maybe you can come over and help eat whatever it is he bakes in here.”

“Maybe _I_ should have a bake-off with your dad,” she jokes, and he ducks his head, laughing.

“I’ll see what he thinks. Thanks, Betts.”

After he’s gone she goes up to her room and puts on music and lays on her bed. She pulls her diary out from under her pillow, and flips back to an entry from the early spring, nearly a year ago. Her own thoughts sound like someone else’s young adult novel. She’d been an entirely different person then.

She drifts off to sleep as the sun sets, her face turned towards the window.

 

 

 

 

Betty’s visit to the gynecologist goes off without a hitch. The doctor writes her a prescription for something called Loestrin, and tells her she should still use a condom for protection from STIs, and that’s that. Veronica takes her to the drugstore and within an hour Betty is the proud new owner of three months’ worth of birth control pills.

She tells Jughead about it on the phone that night, curled up in bed, speaking low so her parents won’t hear.

“I don’t know how I’m going to make it through the next week, Betts,” he says. She pictures him lying in his bed across town, his dark hair falling messy across his forehead, and she feels her stomach tighten pleasurably. She doesn’t know how she’s going to make it through, either.

“Well, we don’t _have_ to wait,” she says. “We could use condoms. It’s just, if it breaks –”

“Whatever you want,” he says, nearly tripping over the words. “I’m not pressuring you. We can do whatever you want. I’ll wait a year if it’s what you want.”

She smiles into her pillow. “I don’t want to wait a _year_ , Juggie.”

“Okay, good,” he says, and Betty giggles, a little too loudly for the middle of the night.

 

 

 

 

Déja vu: Jughead unlocks the door to the trailer, and stands back to let her in first. Despite the interruption the night of the Jubilee, they had both agreed that F.P.’s trailer was really the only place they could be intimate without fear of discovery.

It looks almost exactly like the last time she was here, but now there are dozens of tea lights placed around the living room – on the tv stand and the coffee table and even some on the ground – all of them unlit.

“I thought I’d have all these candles lit when we came in, and it would be really romantic,” Jughead says, shutting the door behind them. “And then I realized that was not only a terrible cliché, but an insane fire hazard as well.”

Betty laughs. “Well, it’s the thought that counts.”

“Gimme a sec.” He pulls a lighter out of his pocket and starts to light the ones on the coffee table, while Betty takes off her coat, folding it over the arm of the couch. Soon the room is lit with soft, flickering light, and the effect _is_ sort of romantic, even if the surroundings are less than ideal. Jughead looks pleased with himself, his hands on his hips as he surveys the room. “Not bad. I guess it’s a cliché for a reason.”

Betty toes off her shoes, kicking them to the side, and watches Jughead as he shrugs out of his jacket and tosses it onto the recliner, soon followed by his hat. Her skin feels warm, electric, like she’s ready to burst, and he hasn’t even touched her yet.

“Hi,” he says, and then she’s on him. Her mouth against his, hot and needy, her hands slipping under his t-shirt. Jughead is smiling so hard that it’s ruining the kiss, and she’d think it was cute if it wasn’t also so frustrating. Betty kisses his jaw instead, liking the feel of faint stubble beneath her lips.

Jughead helps her pull off his shirt, and he toys with the bottom of hers, teasing. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk first? Maybe cuddle?”

Betty nips at his bottom lip. “Later,” she says, and it’s like a flip switches inside Jughead. He backs her up against the door and suddenly her shirt is on the floor, and then her bra, and then his hands are on her, big and warm. Zero to sixty, yet again.

And she _loves_ it.

“Jug,” she pants, tangling her fingers in his hair as he kisses across the tops of her breasts, then moves lower, running his tongue over a nipple. She presses her hips closer and arches against him, flinching when her head hits the ridge of the door. “Ah – _ow_.”

Jughead cradles the back of her head immediately. “God, I’m sorry,” he says, and she almost has to laugh at how flustered he looks, his lips already swollen, his hair sticking up where she’d been pulling at it. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she says, laying her palms against his chest. “But can we go to the bed now?”

He nods with enthusiasm, and she shrieks in delight when he lifts her up, staggering back into his old bedroom, his face pressed right between her breasts. He lays her down on the bed – the pillows smell freshly washed, she notices – and he unbuttons his jeans, pushing them down over his hips.

Betty does the same from where she lies on the bed, wiggling her pants down and off of her ankles. Jughead sits beside her, skimming his hand over her waist, his eyes raking up and down her body. “You’re fucking beautiful, Betts,” he says seriously.

She bites her bottom lip, and pulls him closer.

 

 

 

 

It doesn’t take long for her underwear to come off, and then his. But instead of moving on top of her, Jughead starts to kiss his way down her stomach, past her bellybutton – and further.

Betty’s legs practically tingle with anticipation once she realizes what he’s going to do. “I was not expecting this,” she murmurs, and Jughead looks up at her in disbelief.

“Oh, c’mon. I’m a feminist, Betty.”

She laughs so hard they have to take a break.

 

 

 

 

The first time hurts, but not unbearably so (which is exactly what Veronica had told her it would be like). Betty reminds herself to keep breathing, and she runs her hands over his back, shifts her hips experimentally while he moves.

Jughead keeps his face so still through it all that she starts to wonder if somehow _she’s_ hurting _him_ , until she realizes that he’s just trying to keep it together for as long as he possibly can.

“It’s okay,” she says quietly, her fingernails scratching lightly at the back of his neck. “We can do it again.”

He takes it as she intends it – permission – and he moves his hips faster. It starts to hurt a little more, and Betty digs her nails into his shoulders, but before she can say anything it’s over, and he’s nuzzling at her neck and she realizes she can _feel_ him inside her still as the aftershocks run through his body. It’s strange, but she likes it, too. Jughead shivers a little, and she presses her nose against his hair.

Then the weight of his body on hers makes it kind of hard to breathe, and Betty nudges him off of her. It feels damp and tender between her legs, and he passes her a handful of tissues from the bedside stand to clean herself up. She walks to the bathroom like that, feeling even more vulnerable than the moment he’d first pushed inside of her.

When she comes back Jughead is lying flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling. She climbs back into bed and he rolls over immediately, wrapping her in his arms. “I love you,” he mumbles against her shoulder. “So much, Betts.”

For a moment his affection is too overwhelming. Her eyes well up, and her fingernails creep towards the well-worn grooves on her palm. But then her brain catches up with what her body already knows – this feels _good_. She feels warm and safe and loved, here with him.

Are there things in her life to worry about: yes. But Jughead isn’t one of them.

“I love you, too,” Betty says. “I really, really do.”

**Author's Note:**

> As much as I love the trailer scene - I've gotta go with my gut, which says Betty Cooper is not a girl who's going to have sex for the first time on a whim. Especially not with TWO unplanned teen pregnancies in that family already (seriously, wtf Coopers?). 
> 
> The title is from a lovely Janelle Monáe song called "Say You'll Go".
> 
> Please let me know what you think! :) And feel free to say hi on tumblr, I'm at imreallyloveleee.


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